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We've written before about Anglicanism as 'a language to be spoken and lived, studied and sung'. A few letters to the editors (some published, some not) followed on this conceptualization of something we'd known only by intuition. Most readers understood what we were driving toward: the notion that we know the world around us—and, in turn, meet and know God—through language and the structured ways of thought it gives us. We were concerned that historic Anglicanism should continue to be a mother tongue; that it should be a fluent, growing language with mutual intelligibility across its local dialects; that it should have a widely-known literature and an effective pedagogy; and that our grammar and vocabulary should be better studied and understood. We were concerned, too, that Anglicanism should be a unifying feature of our Christian life together in the family of churches called the Anglican Communion, whether we worship in Welsh, Igbo, French, English, Maori, Haida or Japanese. That was some three years and several church conferences ago. Since that time much of what we've experienced in life on the ground in our parishes and national churches has confirmed these initial ideas about how Anglicanism works at its best and worst. Our vocabulary has remained mostly stable, with words like covenant, process, discernment, fabric, identity, mission, worldwide, and mainstream predominating. (We have still not wrapped our minds completely around the terms indaba and ubuntu, but we would like to if only because those who do tell us they understand these words are very excited about them.) Our grammar has not experienced much of a shift as far as we can tell: scripture, tradition and reason still sustain and give direction to the church communities where they are tapped thoughtfully and sincerely. They give shape to local life in a regular round of word and sacrament, praise and service. So, too, have our patterns of discourse reached a kind of plateau of development. News reports are ever more formulaic: a parish or diocese acts, and a diocese or province then reacts. A cleric astonishes people four thousand miles away, who react and demand explanation. Explanation is made, and indignation congeals around this priest or bishop for a few weeks until a new source of irritation is found. We know that you know this, and that you, too, have begun to perceive Anglican news in this formulaic way. If Anglican political life provided the plots for a film studio, we're sure that this level of repetition would have made us go out of business long ago.
Most interesting to us is that spiritual and juridical communion are being structured more and more strictly around relationships of mutual intelligibility rather than around the divine gift of baptism into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The linguistic metaphor must ultimately fail as a way of forming ideal relationships of Christian communion. The best models of communion we know would tell us that if A is in communion with B, and B is in communion with C, A and C are in communion with one another. However, this is not how languages work. Speakers of A may understand B, and speakers of B may understand C, but this need not have any bearing on whether speakers of A and C understand one another. It's the Facebook communion all over again. We write to describe what we see rather than to provide answers. But we hope that you, as our Christian friends and siblings in a church where conversation, listening, clarification and response have become ends of their own rather than means toward any end, will consider and weigh the implications of breakdown in the Anglican dialect continuum. A plurality of AO readers come from a country in which a simple, hospitable question may be asked in all of these ways:
This wide diversity of expression about the most basic of matters only keeps from tearing a nation apart when non-linguistic cues of warmth, invitation, a set table and intangible generosity supply what is lacking in words or structure. Within the Anglicanophone world, we can still pull back from the apparent brink of mutual unintelligibility if we will see that the table is spread by One who is both other than and wholly like ourselves. The bravest of today's missionary-linguists will be those who show us this truth in ways truly 'understanded of the people'.
See you next week. It's time for dinner. |
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Hallo again to all.
The area where we have seen marked development in the Anglican language over the last three years is in the sphere of